This is the second post to this example blog. To add new posts, just add files to the posts/ subdirectory, or use the web form.
This is my first post.
I sent a note to a friend (1/1/21)
NB (1/5/21) This is a repost of a note originally entitled, simply, "War," that resided on an early incarnation of this blog, to wit "Bob2084," served by one of my desktop machines, not by Branchable.
It hit me like a block of ice about an hour ago. Nov.3 2020 was Pearl Harbor for deplorables.
The election steal was an act of war directed at Trump, yes, but MORE SO at US.
There's one of Trump but millions of us.
They are planning now to register us (like sex criminals) and must be thinking about tracking us with chips in our heads. Call me crazy but the first has already been discussed and how can they NOT be dreaming about those chips?
Afterthought (1/3/21)
Some may experience skepticism as to the "registration" I warn of above. I understand many do not pay adequate attention to current reality, usually as a result of mistaking teevee propaganda for "news."
Progressive wack-jobs have mooted it about on the 'net that perhaps perpetrators of "race crimes" ought to be entered into a national "registry." What they have in mind are a subset of thought crimes, to wit, those offences they believe contain elements of "racism".
The tracking chips are just a hop, skip, and a jump ahead.
His latest is here:
https://thenationalpulse.com/exclusive/the-great-reset-bannon-vigano-biden
This is a repost of a piece that originally (12/28/2021) saw the light of day on one of my older blogs, namely http://trollboy.ddns.net:8080/Bob2084. That site is intermittently unavailable, and all my new contributions will be here on https://bob2084.branchable.com (1/9/2021).
There is something very ODD transpiring. VERY out of the ordinary. Yes we are in the interstice between Christmas and New Year's Day, which in what I recall as "normal" times was always a sort of doldrums: nothing to do but wait for reality to resume its appointed rounds post-Jan-1st. I'll say it again: this time it's different, and, no, I don't think we can safely or responsibly slough it off on the ridiculous pandemic.
There is not a peep to be heard from any quarter in respect ot the election. I haven't looked at the polls lately. Full disclosure: I never actually look at polls, but sometimes the course of my ordinary reading brings me to authors who cite the damn things. As of about a week ago it seemed that the polls were telling us that as many as 48% of the population believed the election was not on the level. Let me be very careful here. If 48% of Americans believe any thing, then that thing ought not be dismissed with nary a glance.
Are we all holding our breath until Jan 20th, hoping we make it to that day with no mountainous upheaval shaking the body politic? When SCOTUS demurred in the face of pleadings from the governor of Texas, charges were made that they were afraid. Throughout the campaign theories were put forward that a portion of the Biden vote was really an anti-Trump vote cast by those who simply yearn for an end to the constant strife that has beset the presidency since Mr. Trump's arrival in that office.
The case of SCOTUS brought forth more specific charges of cowardice, namely that the justices were concerned for their personal safety and that of their families and children. Hint: if the word "dox" does not resonate with you as a semi-term-of-art in today's politics, sit down and feed it into the nearest web browser to your favorite search engine.
Great intuitive powers are not needed to predict possible outcomes should the wheels of progress overturn the victory everyone seems to think was won by Joe Biden, everyone, that is, other than that 48%. Our purveyors of civil unrest have been strangely inactive since the election. Only a few days ago, December 23, 2020 to be exact, a resident of Columbus, Ohio was killed by gunfire from the local police.
Andre Hill, forty seven years old, was armed with nothing more than a cellphone. Mr. Hill was black. Apparently his life doesn't matter to BLM, or antifa, or any of the other collections of those who prefer physical violence as their chosen means of personal expression. But should Donald Trump raise his right hand to swear another oath of office come January, who doubts that the social justice warriors out there will not begin burning down cities again?
I had hoped to say much more when I sat down to create this post, but my mental stamina is not what it used to be. For further reading look up the term "color revolution," then see Michael Anton's "The Coming Coup". Neither of these two assignments will seem new to those of you playing along at home. They have both found the light of day on these pages this past god-awful year.
I have as of my seventy sixth year retained the warm affection for my country that was instilled in me during my childhood. I outgrew the knee-jerk Sixties hatred of these States, and shed the trappings of the Noam Chomsky view of world history that I, like so many others of my generation had, out of the best of intentions, adopted.
The emotional set I bear today centers on grief: deep sadness and mourning for the grievous wound that was inflicted on our body politic, our nation, by the events of Nov. 3, 2020. In the pit of my stomach I have a profound sinking feeling that I can only articulate as a non-verbal conviction of the inevitability of Jan 6th instant's events following the political crime of the century. As Frank Gaffney asked out loud yesterday on-the-air -- I paraphrase -- "Could it have worked out any better for the Dem's if it had been PLANNED?"
NB Apologies to Mr. Gaffney; I am working out of my shaky, old, memory here. I will drum up a link real soon now.
Begin
My experience of the mental heatlh care system began in 1964 (I think; might have been '65). I was then, of course, a consumer of those services. I went on to become also a provider. (Licensed MentaL Health counselor and Certified Addiction Specialist). I had significant tours of duty in a variety of treatment settings, ranging from special-ed high schools, to adolescent substance abuse treatment centers, to inpatient psychiatric hospital services, to name some of them. For several years I pursued psychoanalytic training at one Boston's several institutes. I saw clients in a private counseling practice.
Now
I have now been out of this work for many years, but the imprint of those experiences stays with me in that when I look out at the world and doings of fellow human beings I naturally frame those perceptions in terms of the root metaphors that governed my work in the field, as well as in my personal treatment. In retirement I remain a consumer of mental health services.
Let's start with a practical example. Two interlocutors square off with each other, each hurling the same accusation at the other, namely "You're deluded." Our protagonists have taken up diametrically opposed views of the same question. Is there any recourse to objective means of settling which is mentally ill, and which has formed a correct diagnois? Or, in keeping with the tenor of post-modern times, are all such disputes reducible to mere differences in taste?
In clinical settings delusions present as extremely recalcitrant to treatment, even, or especially, I should perhaps say. when they occur outside of psychotic disorders. Delusions of this type are relatively rare, but when they do present in the hospital they offer very useful occasions for study. Treatment typically devolves to management of the patient's ego-dystonic responses to his disorder.
Delusions occur in settings and contexts other than psychiatric; they can form into large scale "mass" social phenomena. These are, I think, also relatively rare. Following the mid-term elections of 2018 I produced a study of Trump Derangement Syndrome using the root metaphor of delusion. Lately I have noticed that TDS has been supplanted as the most prevalent political delusion in the US. Now one sees the question of the November 2020 presidential election as the axis on which diametrically opposed positions are taken up,
Whose trauma?
Over time I expect more and more people to come to a sense of "Wait a minute here; there's something wrong with this picture."
One would think that, when two groups contend with each other for some desired outcome, and so contend in good faith, and believe the contest is transpiring on a level playing field, that, if at the end of the contest one group says, in so many words, "Wait a minute here; there's something wrong with this picture." that the other group would say, "Well, let's take a look at it. Of what do you speak? We don't want to walk away the supposed winner under false pretenses. This is too important for anything like that."
But that did not happen. Why? This is going to occur to people. They're going to have a burr under their mental saddles, and it will surface at some point very clearly that something went wrong.